Thorsten Mauritsen is appointed professor at Stockholm University

09.02.2018
Science
Atmosphere
Appointments
Climate

Dr. Thorsten Mauritsen "Photo: Malin Mauritsen"

Dr Thorsten Mauritsen, group leader in the department “The Atmosphere in the Earth System” at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), has accepted an appointment at the Department of Meteorology (MISU) at Stockholm University.

Dr Thorsten Mauritsen studied physics and meteorology at the Universities of Copenhagen and Stockholm. He received his PhD in Stockholm in 2007. He has worked at the MPI-M as a postdoc then as a group leader since 2009. Dr Mauritsen’s main research focus within his working group on “climate dynamics” has been Earth’s Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity. The Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity measures the change of the global mean surface temperature of the Earth that arises from doubling the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, CO2. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated the range of climate sensitivity to likely be between 1.5 and 4.5°C in its Fifth Assessment Report, thus encompassing an uncertainty that has not narrowed since the early assessments of climate sensitivity in the 1970's. Dr Thorsten Mauritsen has worked to reduce this uncertainty by conducting unconventional and innovative research to limit especially the upper bound of climate sensitivity.

Leaving for Sweden in autumn 2018, he will continue to investigate climate sensitivity as a professor at Stockholm University. He will use the climate of the past to determine climate sensitivity more precisely. By means of modified climate models, Dr Mauritsen will contrast ideas of a high climate sensitivity, especially due to changes in the cloud fields, with observations of past changes. He also wants to investigate how climate sensitivity behaves when the Earth is out of radiative balance, as is presently the case, and how it might have been different during significantly warmer or colder periods of the past.

Before moving to Stockholm, Dr Mauritsen intends to work closely with a team of MPI scientists as part of project Sapphire, which aims to create a prototype of a global climate model that can simultaneously resolve large convective clouds in the atmosphere as well as eddies in the ocean based on the earth system model of the MPI-M, ICON-ESM. This new model will be unique — long a distant dream for climate scientists — and the development will open up completely new research opportunities for MPI-M.